It must be July, because Fox News is once again hyperventilating over a racially charged non-story. One year ago, it was Glenn Beck’s crusade against Van Jones, the White House environmental advisor who, the host charged, day after day and against all available evidence, was a black nationalist using green jobs as a form of “stealth reparations.”
One year later, the channel’s marquee hosts and anchors are tag-teaming a new fear-mongering race fantasy — the idea that the New Black Panther Party, with the assistance of the Obama Administration, is currently hanging its black militant fangs directly over the arteries of the republic.
On nearly 100 occasions since June 30, Fox News anchors and hosts have breathlessly discussed the marginal group and the “scandal” of the Justice Department’s dismissal of a voter intimidation case filed against two of its members who were videotaped standing outside a Philadelphia poll station on Election Day 2008.
Nobody familiar with the Fox network’s long history of crude and transparent race-baiting should be surprised by the conclusion of Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” Thernstrom told Politico. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the (Obama) administration.”
And what better way to do that than play sensationalized loops of militant-looking black men with zero political power or connections to the White House?
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2010/07/19/another-long-hot-black-nationalist-summer-at-fox-news/